November 19, 2016

Legally, impeachment, which is like an indictment, requires serious wrongdoing in order to be invoked—“Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors,” according to the Constitution. Peterson, the University of Utah law professor, argues that fraud and racketeering fit the bill, and both are at play with Trump University. But the decision is mostly political. That means relatively trivial offenses (perjury regarding extramarital relations, as with Clinton) can get blown up, while serious ones (use of torture in detention, as with George W. Bush) can get ignored. The political will to unseat a president must be overwhelming for things to go anywhere, and the fiasco of Clinton’s impeachment trial, which saw Republicans lose seats in Congress, lessened everyone’s appetite for more of the same.

Constitutional experts of all political stripes say it’s surprising for impeachment talk to bubble up this early—but then Trump has been throwing around some surprising ideas for a leading candidate, calling the Geneva Conventions a “problem” and pitching policies that many see as violating international law. “What he’s stated in my judgment would be clearly impeachable offenses,” said Fein, a former Reagan-era Justice Department official who worked on the Bill Clinton impeachment effort. Likewise, Yale Law School lecturer and military justice expert Eugene Fidell offered a similar prediction for Trump from the left. “He’s certainly said things, which if followed through on, would constitute high crimes and misdemeanors,” Fidell said. And doubtless many of Trump’s foes would like to see him impeached just on principle—the quickest way to broom out a leader who horrifies the inclusive sensibilities of Democrats, and has blown apart the Republican Party he’s nominally part of.